Our Man in Tokyo

Some audience members came up to me after a speech I gave in downtown Tokyo in late April. They were hopping mad at Rahm Emanuel, the man whom Washington sent a little over a year ago to do its business in Japan. And what does that business entail? If Emanuel’s April tweets are any indication, it entails interfering in internal Japanese political matters.

Over a series of tweets in late April, Ambassador Emanuel shared photos of himself and the American Embassy staff heading out—in full rainbow regalia, the new red, white, and blue—to join the Tokyo Rainbow Pride Parade. The usual celebration of civilizational collapse? All in a day’s work for our man in Tokyo. 

But it was this tweet that started the firestorm: “Now is the time, now is the moment for Japan to be all that Japan can be. You could feel the energy in the air at @Tokyo_R_Pride. Today was a parade with purpose.”

Many in Japan were appalled. Not just at the sentiment, of course, or at the tone-deafness of a man who speaks zero Japanese inserting himself into a national debate he knows nothing about. After all, we know that liberal Americans consider themselves culturally superior to the Japanese. That was the entire premise behind dismantling the Japanese constitution and imposing a new one. Never mind that Japan has been a democratic country since the 19th century. 

The sheer cultural chauvinism of the American Embassy is a daily occurrence. And it’s not just the embassy in Tokyo that’s so good at it. Everywhere you find an American diplomatic outpost, you’ll find people who specialize in evangelizing for sodomy and the exportation of democracy via drone strike. Most Americans don’t realize it, but overseas the rainbow flag and the arms deal together have become the national brand.

No, what was appalling was that the American ambassador to Japan was not even pretending that the country he runs as proconsul has a functioning democracy of its own, or any sovereignty to speak of. Teruhisa Se, an extraordinarily thoughtful scholar and public intellectual who teaches political theory and political philosophy at Kyushu University, spoke truthfully when he called Ambassador Emanuel’s display “naisei kansho”—interference in internal governmental affairs.

Emanuel was just getting started. A couple of days after essentially tweeting policy orders to the Japanese government, he was back on Twitter: “The @Tokyo_R_Pride parade may be over, but the march towards #equality continues—now is the time! Great to see @Marriage4All_ Director Matsunaka Gon to talk about how to move forward to a place where there is not ‘gay marriage’ and ‘straight marriage,’ but just ‘marriage.’”

The next day, as his Twitter feed lit up with outraged Japanese people denouncing his high-handed tactics and vowing that Japan would never go the way of the Democrat-run USA, Ambassador Emanuel hit back with this very thinly veiled threat:

The equality countdown begins now. As I said at Tokyo Rainbow Pride and will say again: no one should have patience when it comes to equal rights for all. This is the time, this is the moment to have your voices heard as the Diet meets today. It’s time for a new era where members of the LGBTQI+ community feel at home in [Japan] & [America].

The Diet reference was about an LGBT bill advancing through the Japanese parliament. For weeks on end now, the Japanese papers and the national conversation have been addled with talk about the bill. Pitched as a way to end discrimination against “sexual minorities,” the bill, say its many critics, is unnecessary and will harm Japanese society. 

But who needs democratic discourse? What was apparent to all observers was that Emanuel was pushing to have the bill clear committee and get voted into law before Prime Minister Fumio Kishida hosted the G7 summit in Hiroshima. Japanese politics, as always, bend to serve Washington’s interests.

With that deadline surely in mind, Ambassador Emanuel’s interference in Japanese affairs continued at a fever pitch. On April 26, the American ambassador appointed himself Rainbow Czar for the Far East as he worked to impose Washington’s will. 

“What do the #G7 foreign ministers, Japan Trade Union Confederation (RENGO) @unionion President Yoshino Tomoko, and most Japanese citizens have in common with me?” Ambassador Emanuel tweeted. “We all agree it’s time for #Japan’s anti-discrimination legislation protecting #LGBTQI+ rights.”

And on and on he went. On April 27, above a photo of himself with six members of the Japanese parliament, Ambassador Emanuel lectured: “In poll after poll, the Japanese people have spoken—and they have said ‘no’ to discrimination. These Diet members are trying to make change and protect #LGBTQI+ rights in Japan.”

This of course undermines Emanuel’s entire rationale, at least the ostensible one, for his interference campaign. If Japanese people support something, then the democratic system will sort it out domestically. No action on the part of the Washington proconsul is required. Japanese people are neither stupid nor illiterate. Japanese know how to think and vote, and don’t need any hand-holding or back-pushing from Rahm Emanuel.

Or, does Emanuel not think that Japan is a democratic country? Perhaps he reflexively assumes that he will have to apply the usual dose of “gaiatsu,” foreign pressure, to get the recalcitrant reactionaries in Tokyo to get with the Washington program? That certainly has been the standard operating procedure for the past eight decades. 

It is so ingrained that Emanuel probably doesn’t even realize that his real mission in this country is to act as fixer in a far-flung corner of the Washington Empire. Surely Emanuel has no idea how satrap-y he looks. To wit, the very next tweet on the ambassador’s scroll after the “poll after poll” finger-waving denounced “Chinese economic coercion”—no twisting Japanese arms!

It was then back to the familiar territory of hectoring the Japanese. The piece de resistance of Emanuel’s social engineering experiment came on May 12, when the ambassador shared a video that his staff—by now clearly scrambling to contain a P.R. disaster—made to shore up his position. 

In the video, diplomats from the European Union, Ireland, Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Iceland dance dutifully and sing along in unison to the American ambassador’s very gay tune. LGBT is great, the message runs. Japan needs to get on board with the rest of the world.

“When my closest friends give me the same advice,” Emanuel drives his point home, “I pay attention. Fifteen foreign missions in #Tokyo have each lent their singular voice to a common message: we support universal human rights for all, we support #LGBTQI+ communities, and we oppose discrimination.”

It was not lost on us in Japan that the “fifteen foreign missions” in the video represent polities that lay in societal ruin, places where children are targeted by drag queens and transgender “doctors” and crime has skyrocketed alongside unlimited immigration. No, we would rather not be like the United Kingdom, thanks. 

The top response to Emanuel’s May 12 exercise in no-self-awareness came from a Japanese speaker. It was short and sweet. “Dete ike,” it read. If I might translate this for the benefit of His Excellency, it means, “Get the hell out.”

One of the bitterest ironies of this entire episode, apart from the obvious one that Washington runs Japan anyway and so Ambassador Emanuel really doesn’t need to lay it on so thick, is that Japan has zero need for the “anti-discrimination bill” which the diplomatic missions of fifteen white-people countries are helping to ram through the parliament. Japan is not a Christian country and does not have the body-and-sex hang-ups that seem to come with notions of original sin. What the Westerners call “discrimination” is simply ages-old common sense here. In other words, you can do whatever you want to with your body, but marriage is for raising children and stabilizing society, so don’t try to turn it into a frontier for personal liberation.

In old Japan (meaning, the Japan before liberals bleating in English got to tell Japanese people how to live their lives and run their own country), mixed communal bathing was a feature of towns and villages. Grandmothers and grandfathers, grandchildren, husbands, wives, and awkward teenagers would soak in big volcanic hot spring pools together, nobody wearing anything but a smile. Even today, parents often scrub their kids’ backs in the bathtub, and have their own backs scrubbed in return. It isn’t child abuse. It isn’t sexual in the slightest. It is a part of the daily routine—one washes the dishes, one washes the kids.

The takeaway is that the naked body just isn’t sexually coded here the way that it is in Puritan America. I sometimes stop in restrooms in city parks in Tokyo when rushing between appointments. I have long gotten used to the fact that there are no doors to many men’s rooms, and that the urinals are plainly visible to people passing by. Peep show? No, just peeing. It’s a natural part of being a human being and having a human body. 

It is not just the human body that has a different kind of meaning in Japan. It is sex, too. In old Japan (again, pre-busybody-white-people), shunga, “springtime paintings,” a euphemism for pornography, were perennially popular. The samurai were notoriously promiscuous—not with women, but with one another while out on campaign. Kabuki used to be riddled with male prostitutes. Famed novelist Mishima Yukio was unabashedly gay. One of his rumored lovers, Miwa Akihiro, a transvestite with fluorescent yellow hair, has long been a regular on television, and has spoken openly about the great literary man. 

There are many other transvestites and “okama,” or girlish men, on television. For example, Matsuko, a burly man in a muumuu, is a fan favorite. Haruna Ai, a man-to-woman “new half” (cross-dresser), loves making the audience laugh by switching into his natural, deep male voice for comic effect. Takarazuka, a song-and-dance spectacular featuring butchy women decked out in suits and ties, has been a huge hit in Japan for more than a century. Want to explore your sexual identity in Japan? Go right ahead. Nobody in the world is stopping you.

Here is another irony. It is only when the Americans and other woke Westerners bring in their “enlightened” ideas that Japan tends to run into social problems. On a May 2 Fox & Friends segment about the fallout from the Emanuel debacle, my colleague, journalist Ganaha Masako, explained to the American audience that some of the public baths in Japan were having trouble. Foreign gays and lesbians, it seems, spurred on by the LGBT craze, have been going into the baths to “make out.” The bath proprietors are putting up signs in English and Chinese begging people to behave. But the grossness continues.

I have been to public baths many times. Nobody makes out. There are love hotels for that. Social decorum still means something here. No one is saying you can’t have sex. No one has ever said that in Japan. Despite the population decline, this place remains as sexualized as ever. You just have to know the time and the place for things. It is called civilization. I wish a certain Skokie Puritan pushing social devastation on an already tolerant and vibrant Japan would, as Ganaha wrote in an April 27 tweet, “fix Chicago before ruining my country.”

Ambassador Rahm Emanuel has outed himself as a typical Washington proconsul. It is painfully obvious that he had no clue what was coming when he attempted to force Japan to do what his bosses in Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon want from their client state. With his insulting string of orders over a piece of LGBT legislation the civilizational context of which he clearly doesn’t comprehend, it may be that the American liberals have, at long last, pushed the long-suffering people of postwar Japan too far. 

Conservative commentator and analyst Yamaoka Tesshu perhaps put it best. On May 9, in the context of Emanuel’s disturbing engagement with his People’s Republic of China counterpart that reads like bargaining over the fate of the Indo-Pacific, Yamaoka wrote: “Before you know it, [Rahm Emanuel] is the Prime Minister of Japan and the representative of the Indo-Pacific region. He considers himself the admiral of the region. Japan has once again come under direct rule of the U.S.A.”

It is hard to argue with this assessment. In an astounding revelation of what “democracy” means in Japan when an American ambassador is bearing down on Tokyo, a former parliamentarian named Takashi Nagao said on May 9 that while he knew the names of the Diet members attending a joint committee meeting regarding the LGBT bill, he wasn’t going to disclose that information, and also wouldn’t say what was discussed. It appears that Rahm Emanuel has made Japanese parliamentarians afraid to hold debates in public. Or maybe the Diet members also don’t want people to know who is really running the show.

In a May 12 tweet about our man in Tokyo, Sanseito party leader and beloved anti-establishment figure Kamiya Sohei asked incredulously, “Has there ever been an ambassador like this? Isn’t [Emanuel] making it all too obvious [what is really going on]?”

Masamune Wada, a conservative Diet member now part of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), seems to have figured it out. Wada put it in no uncertain terms when he wrote on May 12 that: “If Ambassador Emanuel wants to use his position as U.S. Ambassador to Japan in any way to influence Japan, we will take immediate action to send him home.”

The mask is off. The reality of Washington’s rule in Japan is exposed.

In an early May interview with Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), I asked a man who has also, like the people of Japan, felt the brunt of Deep State’s displeasure to comment on the Emanuel-LGBT affair.

“You’re asking a question as though Americans really believe this stuff,” the general said. “The answer is that this is intentional. This is not because Rahm Emanuel wants to have a rainbow flag. It’s because this is an intentional direction that the United States of America is going, because that’s what communists do. The rise of communism and Marxism in the United States is very real, and everybody needs to get used to it. It should not be acceptable.”

Yes, that is it exactly. Americans ought to know that, in Japan, what isn’t acceptable isn’t being accepted any longer. We here have seen behind the curtain and now know that it’s not Tokyo running this country, but Washington. And not even Washington, but the cabal of anti-social civilization-wreckers masquerading as the American government and diplomat corps.

Thanks to Washington’s man in Tokyo, the LGBT bill in the Japanese Diet has suddenly shifted meaning. Yes, there is the usual behind-the-scenes politicking going on. For instance, the bill is part of a long march of betrayal by former LDP darling Tomomi Inada, who in the post-Abe Shinzo era is playing her own game of social liberalism for political gain. But none of that seems to matter now. 

The bill is suddenly not the bill. It has morphed into a referendum on how long the post-war will last, how long Washington will get to keep sending Mafiosi like Rahm Emanuel to Tokyo to push people here around.

In Washington, by contrast, it appears that the message still has not sunk in. As if on cue, the Washington Post, sensing that an imperialist Democrat was taking heat, swooped in with a cringe-worthy puff piece on “Rahm-bassador” Emanuel.

Tokyo’s Pride Parade is about to begin and Rahm Emanuel, the American ambassador to Japan who’s supposed to be kicking off the march, is buried somewhere inside the crowd.

LGBTQ rights activists are greeting him like a celebrity. Then he’s spotted talking with U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), a Japanese American and gay member of Congress who is in town for the event. But wasn’t he just over there, chatting with a Japanese lawmaker?

If there’s one word that describes Emanuel’s approach to his new diplomatic incarnation, it’s dynamic. And that dynamism will be on full display this weekend, when the Group of Seven summit takes place in Hiroshima and Emanuel will no doubt be everywhere.

“Dynamic,” WaPo calls direct government of a foreign country by a Washington bureaucrat. Elsewhere the fluff piece lauds the “Rahm-bassador” as “unusually hands-on.” “Japan has embraced Emanuel,” the Post writer lies.

The Post did take brief notice of the tweet-storm against Emanuel, but mentions nothing of the political push to get him out of the American Embassy occupying a huge spread of primo real estate in the Akasaka neighborhood.

But all in all, the Post article encapsulates eight decades of Washington rule in East Asia. “He is pushing for major economies to form an ‘anti-coercion coalition’ to counter the Chinese and advocating for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Japan,” writes WaPo, apparently oblivious to the fact that Emanuel is doing the same thing in Tokyo for which he chides Beijing. 

The Post quotes “Kurt Campbell, President Biden’s coordinator for the Indo-Pacific”—and here we get down to the brass tacks of how Pennsylvania Avenue runs in a straight line to Tokyo Bay. “Alliance managers” like Campbell have been playing little emperor in Japan for most of the 20th century, and all of the 21st so far. Emanuel is the face of a deeply entrenched imperial business headquartered in the District of Columbia. 

In my April speech in Tokyo, I referred to the American Embassy down the street as the “sotokufu,” the “governor-general” of Japan. The audience broke into thundering applause. I said that it was time to throw the governor-general out. The applause got louder. Whether Rahm Emanuel realizes it or not, Washington’s days as Tokyo’s master are numbered. No matter how much the Japanese establishment wants to go on being Washington’s pawn, more and more of the Japanese are done with the American empire and want out.